Secret founder: The Law of mobile Internet entrepreneurship is either one or 0

According to financial world reports, Lin Chengren This six months of life is like riding a roller coaster.

He experienced the pain of falling into the bottom, and also realized the pleasure of straight up the clouds. Just before the "secret", or once the "secrets" became China's hottest social software, Lin Chengren almost gave up the path of entrepreneurship.

The 2013 Lunar New Year Eve, the last day in the traditional sense of the past. Lin Chengren to the station to meet his girlfriend's parents, they plan to spend the spring festival holiday together. Lin Chengren was in a good mood, but then he learned a bad news, his pioneering products, one of "no search Nets" by the "relevant departments" sealed. This is a social news sharing and recommendation of the site, the principle of using artificial intelligence technology, in many pages to find readers interested in content.

Born in 1981, after 3 years of entrepreneurship, Lin Chengren has learned how to avoid touching the bottom line, he would not understand his site where there are problems. Despite Lin Chengren how to communicate and complaints, the website or closed for a full half month, he spent a depressing spring festival in Hong Kong.

Unlike the average local entrepreneur, Lin Chengren's background is more complex and diverse, and he was born in the mainland, moved to Hong Kong with his parents since his childhood and went to the United States to study.

After getting a master's degree in artificial intelligence at the University of California, San Diego, he went into the Amazon internship and finally stayed. In the Amazon this technology talent together company, Lin Chengren performance is still good, he through his efforts, to the Amazon's core technical department, responsible for the user to do the personalized product recommendations.

This kind of education and working background, for Lin Chengren later entrepreneurship laid a good foundation. When he pulled on another Amazon colleague in 2009 and decided to go back to his business, he had friends around him who wanted to be his angel investor. But a good technical background and an international perspective are sometimes the founders ' fetters, which are often interpreted as "not taking the ground."

Lin Chengren Initial Venture also took a lot of detours. Because of the technical advantages of personalized recommendation, combined with his own reading and social interests, Lin Chengren started the first product is entirely his personal style representative. This is a browser plug-in, installed on the page will change the way the presentation, and based on browsing habits recommended content, so that reading become more personalized. According to Lin Chengren, he wants to "change the Chinese reading habits".

This idealistic product is destined to become a niche product, and worst of all, it is blocked by many anti-virus software, and is identified as "malicious plug-ins." So Lin Chengren's first attempt failed.

Subsequently, Lin Chengren led the team to do a lot of products, mostly along the direction of personalized reading, not to find the net is one of them, but the most of the matter is a small plug-in, this plugin is for Web developers to use, installed Plug-ins, the page on the end of an article will automatically recommend the reader is likely to like the article. A total of 20多万家 sites in China are loaded with this product, Lin Chengren also made a platform based on this plug-in ads for these web site traffic to be divided. It was at this time that his team received a round of financing from the capital of Zhi Xin.

But these products then entered the bottleneck period, the tide of the internet rapidly turned to mobile phone as the carrier of the mobile Internet. Crucially, Lin Chengren found that the Chinese need for personalized reading is not so strong. He led the team to develop a "today's headline" Reading app, but he found that the niche was no longer a successor. The rule of thumb for mobile internet is to be one or zero.

At the end of 2013, the whole team was at a low ebb, the product progressed less than expected, and the money was only enough for six months. Under the impetus of the investor, Lin Chengren also tried to talk about the B-round financing, but the result can be expected, not smooth. Later, there was the event of the site being blocked.

In China, morally speaking, a website is not a shameful thing. And sometimes the occasional event accelerates the maturity of the entrepreneur. From the historical perspective, as the entrepreneur Wang, if not because the meal was sealed, he will not be determined to do the group buying site, and then succeed.

But at that time, Lin Chengren under a lot of pressure, although he personally feel "a big deal to go to work in the company", but behind his own a bunch of brothers following years. For an entrepreneur, this is already the bottom of the cause, but unexpectedly, the rebound will be so violent.

After the Spring Festival, let Lin Chengren feel lucky that the early start of the more than 10 small team did not have a small partner to leave, and his only challenge is to find a reliable project, let the team continue to go.

At the beginning of March, he watched the American media report a app called Secret. The anonymous social software is popular among small audiences, the report said. Before that, Lin Chengren had been looking at opportunities in the social product field for a whole year, and he was acutely aware that there were opportunities.

In China, acquaintances have a little faith in social intercourse, and strangers socialize. But these two software have their own bottlenecks, micro-trust friends crowded with acquaintances, "spit" face various public opinion risk, and the stranger social is not just needed. If there is a software that can follow the social chain and avoid public opinion risks, there may be a future.

To understand this, Lin Chengren spent a week trying to "brainwash colleagues", and he asked everyone to get into a new project, and he understood that this was almost the last chance of a "Jedi counterattack".

At the technical and product level, Lin Chengren has full confidence. It took only two weeks, his team developed the Android version and the iOS version of the app, and he made a public account using the open interface of the micro-credit public platform, which was able to anonymously send a message to a friend, or ask a friend anonymously or answer a friend's question. Clearly, the strong social-sharing attributes of micro-credit are more likely to help create "tipping points" for new products.

Lin Chengren A lot of names for the product and decided to name it "secret." This is China's first anonymous social software. At the end of March, the "secret" landed in the Android store, almost no response, April 5, "secret" landing micro-mail and iOS App Store, a hit.

"Secret" app took only one day to get to the top of Apple's free social software download list. Lin Chengren and his pals stared at the computer, all in his surprise and imagination.

"The beginning is the VC circle, the media circle, and then the technology circle and the gay circle, these people themselves are active in information dissemination, through the rapid sharing of social media and let the spread of the climax constantly." "Lin Chengren said. Then, he was hit by the phone bombing of investors and the shelling of the media. "Almost all the well-known Chinese investment agencies have been found, but most of them have been pushed off, and there is no time." ”

The media's shelling focused on "spreading rumors" and "malicious slander", and even commented that the app "exploits the dark and evil in human nature" and "spreads negative energy".

The Lin Chengren of public opinion storms certainly cannot be completely calm. April 9, he made a speech in Shenzhen University, publicly responded that "these comments are in fact to make the product more famous, attacking famous things is one of the media attributes." The reason why journalists are so unkind, he argues, is that "secrets" dispel some of the media's power of discourse.

In private, however, Lin Chengren began to establish a more rigorous system of censorship of information, knowing that if there were no rules it would be tantamount to playing with fire. "Now our screening system is machine plus manual penalties, if the information received three complaints, we will be banned from the account." ”

A night of red is also let Lin Chengren investors unexpected, they have not encountered this situation. To their relief, the company's B-round financing does not need to be played around.

In addition, there are a lot of people who come to the door to "work". One of Lin Chengren's friends received a classmate from his old station, and the students wanted to take a line with Lin Chengren and delete the "negative news" they led in the app. The friend had to pretend that he could not contact Lin Chengren, he smiled: "Perhaps Lin Chengren should take the opportunity to open a public relations company." ”

In fact, marketing companies and PR companies soon put "secrets" on the day-to-day monitoring, and anonymous social software almost overnight established a side of its media attributes.

Like many entrepreneurial stories, in less than one months, Lin Chengren found a lot of so-called competitors around. In this case, he moved out of his own experience of the theory: mobile Internet is either a, or zero.

This time he became one. And the reason he feels he can't replicate is the technology and the team. "A lot of people can not see the place, such as many algorithms, many functions, are our team for many years the formation of the threshold of technology accumulation." ”

The real trouble comes from America. In the absence of an English version of the Secret, the rankings on the American App Store social table have secret. This led to secret initiative to come to talk about cooperation, after the refusal, the US company simply complained to Apple, "secret" suspected plagiarism.

May 8, "secret" by the Apple Store shelves, May 20, "secret" renamed "No Secret" appeared in the App Store, but only one day, and encountered the next frame, June 6, Secret launched the Chinese version, named "Secret", officially entered the Chinese market.

"This is a very helpless thing, secret to our terms is very harsh, we can not agree, and the Apple App Store platform audit in favor of the plaintiff and American companies, we have to communicate and wait." "However, through the roller-coaster-style entrepreneurial process, Lin Chengren has been able to calmly look at these small wind waves." As a typical technical man, Lin Chengren prefers to study products rather than live under the magnifying glass of the media.

June 13, "no secret" of the public account to do a product update, Lin Chengren removed the unpopular anonymous SMS function, and increased the "open press" function, users can solicit anonymous in the micro-trust friends and answer questions. This new product has once again triggered a "brush screen" in a circle of friends.

18th, "no secret" in the Android Platform released 2.0 version of the app. This version opens the letters function, allows the landlord and the circle of friends to letters each other, letters within 5 minutes after the dialogue between the two sides automatically destroyed. This is like a new attempt to "burn after reading".

For "no secret" will be like some products as a flash in the pan, Lin Chengren frankly his heart is not the bottom, he did is to constantly research, improve the retention rate of users. "Product evolution is an unknown, but I believe that anonymous social software and real-name social software will coexist."